by Albert Ellis
What a waste. How unnecessary!
But isn’t emotional pain the human condition? Yes, it is. Hasn’t it been with us since time immemorial? Yes, it has. Isn’t it, then, inevitable as long as we are truly human, as long as we have the capacity to feel?
No, it isn’t.
Let us not confuse painful feelings with emotional disturbance. Humans distinctly feel. Other animals feel, too, but not as delicately. Dogs, for example, seem to feel what we may call love, sadness, fear, and pleasure. Not exactly as we do, but they definitely have feelings.
But how about awe? Romantic love? Poetic ardor? Creative passion ? Scientific curiosity? Do dogs and chimpanzees have these feelings too?
I doubt it. Our subtle, romantic, creative feelings arise from complex thoughts and philosophies. As Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, ancient stoic philosophers, pointed out, we humans mainly feel the way we think. No, not completely. But mainly.
That is the crucial message that Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) has been making for fifty years, after I adapted some of its principles from the ancients and from later thinkers—especially from Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell. We do largely create our own feelings, and we do so by learning (from our parents and others) and by inventing (in our own heads) our own sane and foolish thoughts.
Create? Yes, we create. We consciously and unconsciously choose to think, to feel, and to act in certain self-helping and self-harming ways.
Not totally. Not all together. Not by a long shot! For we have great help, if you want to call it that, from both our heredity and our environment.
No, we are hardly born with specific thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Nor does our environment directly make us act or feel. But our genes and our social upbringing give us strong tendencies to do (and enjoy) what we do. And although we usually go along with (or indulge in) these tendencies, we don’t exactly have to. We definitely don’t.
Not that we have unlimited choice or free will. Heck, no. We can’t, no matter how hard we try, flap our hands and fly. We can’t easily stop our various addictions to such substances as cigarettes, food, and alcohol, or to habits such as procrastination. We have one hell of a time changing any of our fixed habits. Alas, we do!
But we can choose to change ourselves remarkably. We are able to alter our strongest thoughts, feelings, and actions. Why? Because unlike dogs, monkeys, and cockroaches, we are human. As human beings, we are born with (and can escalate) a trait that other creatures rarely possess: the ability to think about our thinking. We are not only natural philosophers, we can philosophize about our philosophy, reason about our reasoning.
Which is damned lucky! And which gives us some degree of self-determination or free will. For if we were just one-level thinkers and could not examine our thinking, could not weigh our feelings, could not review our actions, where would we be? Pretty well stuck!
Actually, we are not stuck or habit-bound—if we choose not to be. For we can be aware of our surroundings and also aware of ourselves. We are born—yes, born—with a rare potential for observing and thinking about our own behavior. Not that other animals (primates, for example) have no self-consciousness. They do have some. But not much.
We humans have real self-awareness. We can, though we do not have to, observe and judge our own goals, desires, and purposes. We can examine, review, and change them. We can also see and reflect upon our changed ideas, emotions, and doings. And we can change them. And change them again—and again!
Now let’s not run this idea of “self-change” into the ground. Of course we have this capacity. Of course we can use it, but not without limits—not perfectly. We get our original goals and desires largely from our biological tendencies and from our early childhood training.
We like mother’s milk (or bottled formulas), and we enjoy nestling up to our parents’ bodies. We like mother’s milk and parental cuddling because we are born to like them, are trained to like them, and become habituated to liking them. So what we call our desires and preferences are not all freely chosen. Many are instilled in us by our heredity and our conditioning.
The more we choose to use our self-awareness and to think about our goals and desires, the more we create—yes, create—free will or self-determination. That also goes for our emotions, both our healthy and our disturbed feelings. Take, for instance, your own feelings of frustration and disappointment when you suffer a loss. Someone promises to give you a job, for example, or to lend you some money, and then backs down. Naturally, you feel annoyed and sad. Good. Those negative feelings acknowledge that you are not getting what you want and encourage you to look for another job or another loan.
So, your feelings of annoyance and sadness are at first uncomfortable and “bad.” In the long run, however, they tend to help you get more of what you want and less of what you don’t want.
Do you have a choice of these healthy negative feelings when something goes wrong in your life? Yes. You may choose to feel very annoyed—or a little annoyed. You may choose to focus on the advantages of losing a promised job (such as the opportunity to try for a better one) and hardly feel annoyed at all. Or you may choose to put down the person who falsely promised you the job and feel happy about being a “better person” than this “louse.”
You may also choose to highlight the disadvantages of getting the promised job (for example, the hassle of commuting to work) and actually make yourself feel quite pleased about not getting it. You might have to work at not feeling sad and annoyed about losing the job, but you could definitely choose to do so.
So you do have a choice about your natural or normal reactions to losing a job (or a loan or anything else). Usually, you would not bother to exert this choice, and you would choose to accept the normal, healthy feelings of annoyance and disappointment, using them in the future to help you. You would live with them and benefit from them.
Now let us suppose that when you are unfairly deprived of a job or a loan you make yourself feel severely anxious, depressed, self-denigrated, or enraged. You see that you are being treated unfairly. You upset yourself immensely about their unfairness.
Can you still choose to have or not have these strong, off-the-wall feelings?
Definitely, yes. Clearly, you can.
That is the main theme of this book: No matter how badly you act, no matter how unfairly others treat you, no matter how crummy are the conditions you live under—you virtually always ( yes, A-L-W-A-Y-S) have the ability and the power to change your intense feelings of anxiety, despair, and hostility. Not only can you decrease them, you can practically annihilate and remove them. If you use the methods outlined in the following chapters. If you work at using them!
When you suffer a real loss, are your feelings of panic, depression, and rage unnatural? No, they are so natural, so normal that they are a basic part of the human condition. They are exceptionally common and universal. Virtually all of us have them—and often! It would be most strange if you did not feel them fairly frequently.
But normal or common doesn’t mean healthy. Colds are very common. So are bruises, broken bones, and infections. But they are hardly good or beneficial!
So it is with feelings of anxiety. Concern, caution, vigilance, and what we may call light anxiety are normal and healthy. If you had absolutely zero anxiety you would fail to watch where you’re going or how you’re doing, and you would soon get into trouble and perhaps even kill yourself.
But severe anxiety, nervousness, dread, and panic are normal (or frequent) but unhealthy. Severity of anxiety leads to dismal overconcern, to terror, and to horror. It can freeze you and help you to behave incompetently and unsocially. So by all means, keep your feelings of concern and caution but junk your feelings of overconcern, “awfulizing,” panic, and dread.
How? First, acknowledge that the two feelings are quite different, and don’t quibble or rationalize that anxiety is a healthy condition. Don’t claim that anxiety is inevitable and has to b
e accepted as long as you live. No. Concern or caution is almost inevitable (and good) for you. But not panic and horror.
What is the difference between concern and panic?
The difference stems from seeing the things you desire as absolute necessities. As I pointed out in A Guide to Rational Living, you create severe anxiety when you jump from inclination to “musturbation.”
If you prefer to perform well and want to be accepted by others, you are concerned that you will fail and be rejected. Your healthy concern encourages you to act competently and nicely. But if you devoutly believe that you absolutely, under all conditions, must perform well and that you have to be accepted by others, you will then tend to make yourself—yes, make yourself—panicked if you don’t perform as well as you supposedly must.
What luck! If the theories of Epictetus, Karen Horney (who first talked about the “tyranny of the shoulds”), Alfred Korzybski (the founder of general semantics), and REBT are correct, you almost always bring on your emotional problems by rigidly adopting one of the basic methods of crooked thinking—musturbation. Therefore, if you understand how you upset yourself by slipping into irrational shoulds, oughts, demands, and commands, unconsciously sneaking them into your thinking, you can just about always stop disturbing yourself about anything.
Always? No, just about always.
For there are, as discussed later, a few exceptions to the rule of musturbation. But in about ninety-five out of a hundred cases, you can spot your musturbatory thinking, feeling, and behaving; change them; and refuse to be miserable about the hassles that you “normally” upset yourself about.
Really? Yes, really, as you can rationally figure out if you think about it.
Can I prove this REBT claim? I think that I can. Modern psychology has done many experiments showing that panicked and depressed people have been able, by changing their outlooks, to overcome their disturbed feelings and to lead much happier lives. Recently, thanks to researchers who do studies of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, Cognitive Therapy, and other Cognitive Behavioral Therapies, more than two hundred controlled scientific studies have shown that teaching people how to change some of their negative ideas helps them to feel and act much better. Hundreds of other studies indicate that the main techniques used in REBT work effectively.
Still another batch of scientific studies—at the present writing, over 250 of them—have tested whether the main irrational Beliefs (iBs) that people hold (and that I pointed out in 1956) actually show how emotionally disturbed they are. About 95 percent of these studies show that people who have serious emotional problems admit that they have more irrational beliefs than people who have lesser problems.
Does all this scientific evidence prove that you can easily discover your unconditional, rigid shoulds, oughts, musts, commands, and demands that make you miserable and soon give them up? Can you quickly become a clear thinker and thereafter lead a carefree life?
Not necessarily! It takes, as the rest of this book will show, more than that. But there is an answer. You definitely can see, dispute, and surrender the irrational ideas with which you upset yourself. You can use scientific thinking to uproot your self-defeating dogmas.
How? Read the next chapter and see.
But first, an exercise.
REBT Exercise No. 1
At first, the following exercise seems very simple, but it is not quite as easy as it appears. It gives you practice at distinguishing between your healthy and your unhealthy negative feelings when you view something in your life as “unfortunate” or when you are concerned about a “bad” event occurring.
DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN HEALTHY CONCERN, CAUTION, VIGILANCE, AND UNHEALTHY ANXIETY, NERVOUSNESS, AND PANIC
Imagine an unfortunate thing that might happen to you soon, such as losing a good job, being hurt in an accident, or losing a loved one. Vividly imagine that this event may easily occur. How do you feel? What are you telling yourself in order to create this feeling?
If you feel healthy concern or caution, you are telling yourself something such as, “I certainly wouldn’t like this unfortunate thing to happen, but if it does occur, I can handle it.” “If my mate were very ill or dead, that would be very sad, but I could still live and be reasonably happy.” “If I lost my sight, that would be exceptionally handicapping, but I could still have a good many enjoyments.”
Notice that all these thoughts state how deprived and sorry you would be if certain events occurred, but all add a but that would still leave you an option for living and enjoying life.
If you feel unhealthy anxiety, nervousness, or panic, look for these kinds of musts, necessities, awfulizings, I-can’t-stand-its, self-downings, and overgeneralizations: “If I lost my job, as I must not, I could never get a good one again, and that would show what a wholly incompetent person I am!” “I must have a guarantee that my mate must not die, for if he or she did, I couldn’t stand being alone and would always be miserable.” “It’s absolutely necessary that I not lose my sight, for if I did, my life would be awful and horrible, and I could never enjoy anything again!”
Note that these are predictions of unconditional and complete pain and that they leave you no way out of continual suffering.
Imagine, again, that something dreadful has actually happened to you, such as losing all your money, having a boss who is always criticizing you, or being treated unfairly by your best friend or mate. Do you, as you imagine this, feel only sorry, sad, and regretful? Or do you also feel unhealthily depressed or angry?
If you feel depressed, look for shoulds, oughts, and musts like these: “I should have been more careful with my money. What a fool I was for not being more cautious!” “My boss ought not criticize me like that! I can’t bear that kind of continual criticism!”
If you feel very angry, look for musturbating self-statements like these: “My best friend must not treat me that unfairly! What a thorough louse he is!” “My living conditions have to be better than they are! How unjust and horrible it is that things are this way!”
Whenever you have strong negative feelings because unfortunate things are actually happening to you or you imagine that they might occur, see whether these feelings healthfully follow from your wishes and desires to have better things occur. Or are you creating them by going beyond your preferences and inventing powerful shoulds, oughts, musts, demands, commands, and necessities? If so, you are turning concern and caution into overconcern, severe anxiety, and panic. Observe the real difference in your feelings!
3
Can Scientific Thinking Remove Your Emotional Misery?
You can figure out by sheer logic that if you were only—and I mean only—to stay with your desires and preferences, and if you were never—and I mean never—to stray into unrealistic demands that your desires have to be fulfilled, you could very rarely disturb, really disturb, yourself about anything. Why?
Because your preferences start off with, “I would very much like or prefer to have success, approval, or comfort,” and then end with the conclusion, “But I don’t have to have it. I won’t die without it. And I could be happy (though not as happy) without it.”
Or your preferences begin with, “I would distinctly dislike or abhor failure, rejection, or pain, but I can stand it. I won’t collapse. I can still be reasonably happy (though not as happy) if I have these unfortunate experiences.”
When you insist, however, that you always must have or do something, you often think in this way: “Because I would very much like or prefer to have success, approval, or pleasure, I absolutely, under practically all conditions, must have it. And if I don’t get it, as I completely must, it’s awful, I can’t stand it, I am an inferior person for not arranging to get it, and the world is a horrible place for not giving me what I must have! I am sure that I’ll never get it, and therefore I can’t be happy at all!”
When you think in this rigid, musturbatory way, you will frequently feel anxious, depressed, self-hating, hostile, and self-pitying.
Just stick to your profound, rigid shoulds, oughts, and musts, and you will see how you feel!
Are dogmatic and unconditional musts the only causes of emotional problems? No, not exactly. Some disturbances, such as psychosis and epilepsy, may include few musts. Other mental problems, such as severe depression and alcoholism, may involve physical ailments that actually create, as well as are created by, musts and other forms of crooked thinking.
But the usual kinds of emotional disturbances or neuroses (such as most feelings of anxiety and rage) largely come from grandiose thinking. Even when you have great feelings of inadequacy? Yes, your inferiority feelings are, ironically, the result of your godlike demands.
Take Stevie, for example. Twenty-three, with a law degree and well on his way to becoming a CPA, Stevie seemed to have everything anyone could want. Including a great build, almost perfect features, and adoring—and filthy rich—parents. Yet, Stevie was a social basket case—with no friends, no dates, unable to talk about anything but law and business. And he thoroughly hated himself.
Did Stevie have an older brother who was much better at socializing?
Was he unconsciously guilty about lusting after his mother?
Had he struck out on the ball field with three kids on base and been laughed at by all his sixth-grade classmates?
Did his father yell at him for masturbating and threaten to cut his penis off?
None of the above. Stevie had few childhood traumas and succeeded at almost everything he did. But . . . ?
By the time he reached puberty, in spite of the love and acceptance of his parents, and in spite of his fine performance at school and at sports, Stevie hated himself. Why?
Because he was lousy at conversation. He had a high-pitched voice and a slight lisp. And, perfectionist that he was, he demanded of himself that he speak beautifully. But the more he insisted that he had to speak very well, the more he stuttered and stammered. Then he mainly shut up and withdrew.